Formerly RJ Naturals, Orange County's COZY Foods makes a refrigerated snack bar with grass-fed butter and just eight real ingredients. It started as a homemade bar for a husband going through stage four cancer.
Most snack bars are built to sit on a shelf for months. COZY's is built to live in your fridge.
That one design choice says a lot about the brand. COZY Foods, the Orange County snack company formerly known as RJ Naturals, makes what it calls the Butterbar: a soft, chilled bar made with grass-fed butter, sweetened with dates, and built from just eight ingredients. No preservatives. No seed oils. According to the company, it's the first refrigerated snack bar on the market made with grass-fed butter.
But the story behind the bar started somewhere much harder.
When Russell Menez was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma, he and his wife Julia went looking for snacks they could trust during treatment. They came up short. Most options were heavily processed, overly sweet, or packed with ingredients built for shelf life, not nourishment.
So Julia started making bars from scratch in their kitchen, using dates, oats, coconut, grass-fed butter, raw honey, and a few pantry staples. At first, the bars were just for Russell.
After Russell entered remission, the couple began sharing them with friends, family, and their local community. People kept asking for more.
That demand turned into RJ Naturals, a small homemade bar sold locally. The couple treated it as an experiment: was there a real market for a refrigerated, whole-food snack bar?
Nearly a year later, the answer was yes. In July 2026, the company rebranded as COZY, a name built around its mission of "Real Food Comfort."
Russell described RJ Naturals as the brand's test phase, a way to prove demand and get to know its customers. He called the rebrand an evolution, not a pivot.
Every Butterbar follows the same short formula:
Dates handle all the sweetness, with no refined sugar added. Grass-fed butter is the key to the texture. Instead of the dry, chalky crumble common in protein bars, COZY's bars are soft and dense, closer to a baked good than a gym snack.
Each 2-ounce bar has 5 grams of fiber.
The bars come in two flavors: Warm Cinnamon, which the brand compares to a soft cinnamon roll, and Salted Matcha, an earthy, lightly sweet option with a touch of sea salt.
Keeping the bars cold is what lets COZY skip preservatives entirely. It's the same logic behind fresh food: when you don't need a product to last forever at room temperature, you don't need to engineer it to.
The bars can be stored refrigerated or frozen, which gives both shoppers and retailers flexibility.
COZY positions the Butterbar for everyday moments: a pre- or post-workout bite, a mid-afternoon reset, a pairing with morning coffee or matcha, or a better-for-you sweet fix.
COZY is now sold in more than 55 locations across California, including Mother's Market & Kitchen. That's up from about 40 Southern California locations earlier this year, spanning natural grocers, coffee shops, wellness studios, and gyms.
In July, COZY was one of just 10 brands selected from hundreds of applicants to exhibit in the Innovation Section of the UNFI Central & West Holiday & Winter Selling Show in Las Vegas.
The company is also raising pre-seed funding to support a move into co-manufacturing and a wider retail push, with a national launch planned within the next two years.
The Butterbars are sold online in 8-, 16-, and 24-packs. An 8-pack is $49.99 as a one-time purchase, or $44.99 with a recurring subscription.
COZY lands in a snack aisle that's shifting fast. Shoppers are reading labels more closely, pushing back on seed oils and long ingredient lists, and looking for foods that feel real.
For Russell and Julia Menez, that shift isn't a trend. It's where they started. Julia has said the goal of COZY is to stay true to why they began: real food that feels like comfort, for families who want to trust what they're eating.
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